Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

What happens after coding is solved? | Fiona Fung (Manager of the Claude Code and Cowork Teams)

June 21, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Fiona Fung, who leads the teams behind Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic, has watched the job of an engineer transform more in the past two years than in the previous twenty-five. Anthropic engineers now ship roughly eight times as much code per quarter as they did in 2025. Coding is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck has shifted to verification, prioritization, and culture. Fung’s operating philosophy — built across stints at Microsoft, Meta, and now Anthropic — offers a concrete picture of how to lead when the rate of change is itself the defining constraint.

The shift from output to outcome

Fung is skeptical of productivity metrics that measure activity rather than impact. She compares the current temptation to “token max” — maximizing AI usage for its own sake — to the old trap of measuring lines of code. Both reward motion, not progress. On her teams, the focus is on outcomes: what problem are we trying to solve, and did we solve it? She keeps a Claude Code remote session connected to all her team’s repos and Slack channels. Every month, she shares her screen and walks through what shipped, how it performed, and what feedback surfaced. The goal is not surveillance but conversation — a way to turn high throughput into shared learning.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (09:56) **What an AI-pilled engineering team looks like in 2026** - Shift from coding as bottleneck to verification, quality, and everyone becoming a builder
  • 2 (10:10) **Claude Code remote session as management tool** - Manager uses a dedicated Claude instance with full repo + Slack + metrics access for visibility and coaching
  • 3 (12:42) **Feedback loops and routines for staying on top of output** - Morning ritual of scanning channels evolves into automated routines that surface themes and draft PRs
  • 4 (14:41) **Automating code review while preserving human judgment** - Claude handles routine reviews; humans reserved for deep subject-matter areas
  • 5 (17:05) **Two hiring profiles that work now** - Creative builders with product sense + deep systems experts for the hard parts
  • 6 (19:40) **Common traits of engineers thriving vs. struggling** - Growth mindset, curiosity, and agency separate the two groups
  • 7 (26:31) **Helping non-technical people adopt AI** - Fiona’s work onboarding small businesses to Claude for Work

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Fiona Fung leads the teams behind Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic (overseeing Boris Cherny and the entire engineering and PM team). Before Anthropic, she spent 11 years at Microsoft building Visual Studio and TypeScript and then moved to Meta, where she started Facebook Marketplace (now generating over $100 billion in GMV annually), worked on Meta’s first smart glasses and AR glasses, and led infrastructure, growth, integrity, and safety teams at Instagram. She’s been an engineer for over 25 years and has a unique perspective on how the role of building software is changing.

In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:

1. What she’s learned about running a team that’s shipping 8x more code than before

2. Which roles AI will transform next

3. Specific ways her team uses AI

4. How Claude “routines” have changed how she operates as a manager

5. The context-switching problem no one has solved yet

6. The biggest unsolved problem in AI

7. What keeps her up at night

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Where to find Fiona Fung:

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/fionafung

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction to Fiona Fung

(02:31) How the engineering role has transformed over 25 years

(09:28) What an AI-pilled software team looks like in 2026

(12:26) Using Claude to manage and review team output

(14:40) The evolution of code review and verification

(16:55) Who to hire: creative builders and deep systems experts

(18:18) The shift to ambitious thinking

(19:40) The growth mindset required to thrive in AI-native teams

(25:52) Helping small businesses adopt AI tools

(31:46) How Anthropic spots latent demand and builds for it

(35:08) The next frontier: asynchronous work with AI routines

(38:06) Agency and accountability in AI-native teams

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